Showering Star Quilt Finished

It is finished! Tolley had to get on the pillow and in the picture. She is my sewing room companion. When I am sewing she lays behind my sewing machine and sleeps.

I used several, new to me, techniques on this project. The first technique involved using paper templates for the quilting. The picture below shows the first two rows of the paper template. A special thanks to my husband for help with the templates.

As you might notice from the picture, I worked in linear fashion. I laid out the first two rows of paper templates in the middle of the quilt. I quilted my way from one end to the other. Then carefully ripped the paper off. Then, I laid the next row of paper templates, quilted, and ripped off the paper. I repeated this process until the quilt was fully quilted.

Now, I wonder if it would have been easier to divide the quilt into 4 quadrants for quilting. I would have quilted the upper left quadrant first. Then moved to bottom left quadrant and so forth.

As it was I discovered I could only pin and quilt one row a day. It just was too mentally and physically challenging to do more. So one quilted row a day. Then I had to move on to other projects or household demands.

As noted earlier, I ended up laying one row of the paper template at a time instead of the double row shown here. After the first two rows I stopped using adhesive and pins. I used pins only to hold the paper template in place. After the wash and dry I am glad I did change to just pinning as the lint seems to build up around the spots where I used adhesive.

The two pictures above show samples of the quilting on front and back. I used a white flat sheet for the back so I did not have to piece the back.

The other thing, new to me, is I sewed the binding on the back, folded to the front, and machine sewed 1/4 inch from the edge. I like the look and it eases the strain on my right wrist and hand. When I hand bind my hand and wrist begin to ache.

While I don’t think I will do the paper template process on a big project again, I will do machine binding.